We begin our discussion of Urban Fantasy with a discussion of definitions, which quickly devolves into an argument over what we are actually supposed to be talking about. Moving right along, we explore what sorts of things we find in an Urban Fantasy, and what sorts of rules these stories usually abide by.

Dan tells us how he set about writing the John Cleaver books, which certainly qualify as Urban Fantasy, Howard tackles the burning question of where one might start in the project of building a mythos, and Brandon explains
his own Urban Fantasy projects, including one failure from which we can all learn an important lesson.

Audiobook Pick-of-the-Week: The Dresden Files Book One: Storm Front, by Jim Butcher, narrated by James Marsters.

Writing Prompt: . Give us an Urban Fantasy in which the point of origin for your crossover is big box store retail spaces which somehow breach the boundary between our world and the magical one.

This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by Audible.
Visit http://AudiblePodcast.com/excuse for a free trial membership*.
*Note: From the Audible website, here are the terms of the free membership. Read the fine print, please!

Audible® Free Trial Details
Get your first 14 days of the AudibleListener® Gold membership plan free, which includes one audiobook credit. After your 14 day trial, your membership will renew each month for just $14.95 per month so you can continue to receive one audiobook credit per month plus members-only discounts on all audio purchases. A very small number of titles are more than one credit. Cancel your membership before your free trial period is up and you will not be charged. Thereafter, cancel anytime, effective the next billing cycle. Any unused audiobook credits will be lost at cancellation.

Powered by RedCircle

Transcript

as transcribed by Mike Barker

Key points: Urban fantasy? Sometimes defined as broadly as fantasy that takes place in modern-day. Genre fiction is built around a sense of escape from reality, what if, and anchor points. A lot of urban fantasy is built around the secret history, the underworld of magic. Another big chunk has the world changed, and everyone knows about magic. Howard said, “There’s almost no way to write without tripping over the tropes…. Your story has to be about interesting characters doing interesting things in interesting ways.” If you want to do a secret history or magical underground urban fantasy, make sure you know what ties the two worlds together and keep your characters moving between the two worlds.

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, Season Five, Episode 32, Urban Fantasy.
[Howard] 15 minutes long because you’re in a hurry.
[Dan] And we’re not that smart.
[Brandon] I’m Brandon.
[Dan] I’m Dan.
[Howard] I’m Howard.
[Brandon] And I’m finally back.
[Howard] Yay!
[Brandon] Except I’m sick, and so… actually, I’m not sick, I’m just… my voice is changing, it’s finally hitting me.
[Dan] Yes.

[Brandon] Urban fantasy. We’ve had a lot of requests about urban fantasy. I’ve actually written some urban fantasy now. In fact, between last fall and now, I’ve written three urban fantasies, because that’s how I am. So, let’s start with a genre definition. Let’s talk about what is urban fantasy. What do we even mean by that? Dan?
[Dan] OK. Well, depending on who you ask, urban fantasy can be defined as broadly as a fantasy novel that takes place in modern-day. It does not necessarily have to be urban, in the sense that it takes place in a city. A lot of people consider the John Cleaver series to be urban fantasy, even though it takes place in a very small town, and is basically a horror story.
[Brandon] Yeah. Would you say that urban fantasy, like… That term grew out of people not really wanting to use the horror term anymore? Or was it around before then?
[Howard] You know what? I think that the term urban fantasy was when… werewolves and vampires, that’s a little more on the horror angle. You see them in urban fantasies, but I remember a series from Mike Resnick, a series of short stories in which the things that went bump in the night were unicorns and fairies. That felt more like high fantasy mapped onto Manhattan. I really think that’s where the term came about, but I’m not a… historian.
[Brandon] No, I think that might be it, because I think I do sometimes assume that it was part of that whole horror schism when horror split into three different genres, but…
[Dan] Well, I think that it was more a case of… this is just speculation, but that horror taking advantage of the term. Saying, “Oh, hey. Now here’s something else we can call ourselves, so people will not avoid our section of the bookstore anymore.”
[Howard] This part of the discussion, for me, is kind of circling the drain, because somebody in the comments is going to go google the history of urban fantasy and show us all up. So let’s talk about how to write it.

[Dan] That’s true. Thanks in advance, person in the comments.
[Brandon] But you’re the one that told me he wanted to do a more definition based podcast first, Howard.
[Howard] Did I say that?
[Dan] Oh, burn.
[Howard] Did I say that?
[Brandon] Yes.
[Howard] That was your suggestion. OK. Fine.
[Jordo] I’ve got it on tape.
[Brandon] Oh good, Jordo’s got it on tape. He proves me right again.

[Brandon] So… no, really, this is interesting to talk about because I do think that there was an influx… a lot of times when we talk about urban fantasy now, we talk about the vampire and werewolf fantasy. But there is this whole idea that urban fantasy was also kind of the Shadowrun stuff. I remember back in the early 90s where we had the whole let’s mash modern technology or future technology together with fantasy tropes and see what we get. That was urban fantasy, too.
[Dan] Yah. I think urban fantasy in a lot of ways is just a desire to write modern stories that are genre fiction without being science fiction. So we’re going to…
[Howard] What’s interesting about it, though, is that both urban fantasy… both? All three of them… urban fantasy, certain sorts of epic fantasy, and science fiction… you all… they all have to abide by these rules of internal consistency. When you’re doing urban fantasy, the shotgun has to work exactly like the shotgun works in science fiction. Or in military fiction.
[Brandon] Well… except…
[Howard] When I say… except, you can have magical ammo.
[Brandon] Or, accept, there’s always this… a lot of urban fantasy likes to play with the technology doesn’t work real well as soon as you cross into the fae/borderlands kind of area.
[Howard] That’s fine. You can do that. But you have to come out and explicitly say that. You can’t just sort of hand wave at the shotgun… not if you’re going to be using it. Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter International is urban fantasy, and it’s also military sci-fi. Sort of.
[Brandon] Right. So, the question comes to mind… our listeners, if they’re going to write urban fantasy, do they really need to know this genre? Do they need to know the different types of it? It seems like people who write urban fantasy… let me preface this, kind of do it accidentally a lot of the time.
[Dan] Yeah. That’s what I was going to say. I think in some ways… I will never suggest that you don’t need to know a genre because you’ll end up repeating what people have already done. But on the other hand, urban fantasy is, if any genre can claim this, urban fantasy can claim this. You can do pretty much anything because it’s wide, wide open. Everything from a paranormal romance to Harry Dresden to the vampires and werewolves… there is room for almost anything in there.
[Brandon] Even Harry Potter, to an extent, is urban fantasy.
[Howard] Yeah, Harry Potter is urban fantasy.
[Brandon] Well, it kind of is half-and-half. Half the books are urban fantasy, and half of them are high fantasy. But it really gets into a matter of semantics here.

[Brandon] So let’s go ahead and do what Howard wanted us to do… just because Howard is… you know.
[Howard] Wait. You just said that I wanted…
[Dan] Grumpy Howard, working his evil will upon us.
[Howard] Fine. What is it that I wanted us to do?
[Brandon] You wanted us to talk about how to write it.
[Howard] Yes, please.

[Brandon] Dan, you are the best urban fantasy writer among us. So how do you write urban fantasy?
[Dan] Dang it. How do I write urban fantasy? I don’t know.
[Brandon] Let me define that question a little bit better, because it’s a terribly unfair question.
[Dan] OK. Please.
[Brandon] Do you consciously decide when you’re writing urban fantasy… do you try to keep the laws of the magic and things a little bit closer to reality, or, on the other hand, do you try to be way out there to provide a contrast, or is it somewhere in between?
[Dan] In the Serial Killer series, the John Cleaver books, I very specifically didn’t ever explain what the monsters were or where they come from. In the third book, which will be out by the time this airs, you don’t know… you still don’t know. Sorry, if you were all waiting for that explanation. That’s because I liked having that mystery. So there’s… it fits within the real world, but I don’t ever give a scientific or academic explanation of, “Oh, this is how these creatures came to be, this is where they come from, this is how they work.”
[Brandon] But wouldn’t you say there’s a movement in urban fantasy for that scientific explanation? I’ve seen a lot of, for instance, vampire fiction where the idea is let’s try and make the vampires rational. Let’s explain them by science because we are moving to this borderland between science fiction and fantasy. So let’s go ahead and use scientific rationale for the fantasy monsters.
[Dan] Yeah. We’re starting to see that a lot. Zombies and vampires, now more often than not, are caused by some kind of virus or plague. That’s a scientific…
[Howard] Or nanomachines.
[Dan] Yeah. People using a scientific explanation for how this can happen. Which is cool. I don’t think the entire genre is moving in that direction, but a portion of it is. It’s the same thing you see in science fiction between hard SF and space opera. There are different audiences that want different things.

[Brandon] OK. Let’s pause for our book of the week. Why don’t we go ahead and promo book one of the Dresden Files since we’re talking urban fantasy.
[Howard] Oh, absolutely.
[Brandon] I think we may have promo’ed it before, but it’s really a fantastic book. I loved it quite a bit. If you want to see really good urban fantasy written well, go ahead and read The Dresden Files.
[Howard] Go out to audiblepodcast.com/excuse where you can kick off a 14 day free trial. The Dresden Files audio books are read by… oh, no, I’ve forgotten his name. Played Spike on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series.
[Brandon] Oh, really?
[Dan] James Marsden.
[Howard] James Marsden. Marsters. James Marsters. They are such fun to listen to. I’ve listened to, I think all but the last two of them, and I’ve loved them.
[Dan] For the ease of our listeners, what’s the name of the very first Dresden File?
[Howard] Storm Front.
[Brandon] Excellent book.
[Howard] Fantastic.

[Brandon] So. All right.
[Howard] Let me tackle the where to start question, because fundamentally, I believe that genre fiction is built around a sense of escape from reality. And the what if. But we have to have anchor points. So when I look at urban fantasy, I like to feel grounded in reality, but there are aspects of the reality around us that… whether it’s mythology or urban mythology… things that don’t make sense. The traveling hitchhiker ghost story, or the fact that all your left socks go missing in the dryer … it’s fun in an urban fantasy to take hold of some of those and start building a mythos that explains them. Now, the bit with the socks? I think that’s been done in the Dresden… I think that’s been done like in a dozen…
[Dan] It’s been done everywhere. Even Harry Potter does that one.
[Brandon] It’s very common. I mean, it’s the same idea… another big trope of this is the idea that, “Oh, all the stories and legends that we talk about have their roots in this other world…” that is part of it.
[Dan] When we were talking about historical fiction, one of the three types we mentioned is what we call the secret history. The this is the real story behind the historical event. You see that all the time in urban fantasy. This is the real story about why this monument exists, and all the creatures that live underneath it, things like that.
[Howard] I actually don’t think that urban fantasy can work well without that unless you’re doing an urban fantasy in which a magical meteorite strikes and suddenly the rules change. The role-playing game Rifts would qualify under certain terms as urban fantasy because we had a… was it a nuclear war that opened up magical portals?
[Dan] [garbled inaudible]
[Howard] So you didn’t need to explain missing socks.
[Brandon] Those are, I would say, the two big divisions in urban fantasy. The kind of Shadowrun type thing where it’s everyone knows about all of this magic and the world has changed, and, more commonly, what’s referred to as urban fantasy would be the there is a secret underworld, there is a secret side.
[Dan] Yeah. The muggles and the wizards with this big separation between them.
[Howard] So writing that…
[Dan] It can be hard. I, several years ago in our writing group, started trying to write an urban fantasy, and it was just so cliched. I don’t know if Brandon remembers this, but it really was… it was me trying to do a grown-up Harry Potter almost. I mean, not on purpose, but that’s how it came out because you have to be careful not to just repeat what others have already done.

[Howard] What that comes back to is what we talked about in our discussion of trope. There’s almost no way to write without tripping over the tropes. So your story can’t be about the setting, the missing socks or the secret history. Your story has to be about interesting characters doing interesting things in interesting ways.
[Dan] I think that’s the biggest piece of advice I want to give right now, is if you want to write an urban fantasy, make sure you have a really good story behind it. Don’t just say urban fantasy… like you said, don’t just write setting, make sure you have good characters and a good story.

[Brandon] I’ve now written three urban fantasies. One was a failure, two turned out real well. None of them have been released yet, folks. But they are coming. Alloy of Law, the Mistborn book, is a Mistborn urban fantasy, coming out later this year. The one that didn’t work out the way I wanted it to, it was called Death by Pizza. Which was a pretty standard underworld urban fantasy. What I found was, and the reason it kind of failed for me as a book… and I still want to write… make this book work. But by about the three quarters mark, I realized that the urban element didn’t matter. That I had dug so deeply into the fantasy element… it was all taking place during this one night, and it was all taking place during the fantasy parts of the city. The more I wrote it, the less the fact it was happening in a city mattered.
[Howard] The less important the city became.
[Brandon] Yeah. It eventually just ended up becoming a high fantasy.
[Dan] Just a straight up epic fantasy.
[Brandon] So I stopped at about the three quarters mark and said I’m writing something that’s neither one and it’s really not working. I think that what Dan is saying here is right. I mean, I didn’t want to fall into the cliches of the genre, but by avoiding them so strongly, I ended up going too far the other direction. I really think there needs to be some integral concept tying these two worlds together and have the characters be moving between the two worlds. Otherwise, I think the book’s going to end up like Death by Pizza did.
[Dan] Yeah. In your defense, Death by Pizza was the first of the three that you wrote. You learned your lesson, and the last two are very good.
[Brandon] Yes, but the last two, I took the other route. The last two, magic is a well known and accepted part of the world. It isn’t the underworld magic. So because of that, I kind of dodged the issue and said, “Well, I can integrate these by making… by integrating them that way.” Both of those turned out really well. They integrated fine. But I didn’t do the underground secret world. Which… that’s really hard to do without falling into all the same cliches. I think the Dresden Files manages it by integrating aspects of the fantasy world very strongly into the real world. There are mobsters that are crossing the line to… they’re getting involved in magical stuff and they’re not quite ready for it, and there are police who are accidentally investigating magical things. Harry himself is a wizard who’s actively and openly a wizard in a world that doesn’t believe wizards exist.
[Howard] I think the reason the Dresden Files works, in spite of the tropes, is that it plays on a different trope, which is the film noir detective guy.
[Brandon] Yeah. It does do that.
[Howard] That marriage of elements feels a little bit like genre busting or genre blending, and is one of the reasons they succeed. The other reason I think it succeeds is that he’s telling a very long story arc in an episodic nature which really draws readers in to what’s going on.
[Brandon] Well, and he’s making some really solid elements. The Council of the Wizards or whatnot, and all of these different things. They work really well. But I also do think it is that blending. In his books, you’re never allowed to forget either world. You don’t forget the real world, you don’t forget the fantasy world. The two are rammed up against each other, and they’re in each other’s face. I think this is a strength of the books that I wasn’t able to achieve in my first attempt.
[Dan] Yeah. I think you can see that in other urban fantasies as well, like Harry Potter. As the story expands, the scope of the story expands, it necessarily includes the real world. They have people… wizards whose whole job is to interface with the humans… not the humans, but the muggles, and make sure that they know what’s going on and that they’re protected from the various magic things that are happening, so…
[Brandon] As we said, Harry Potter really only dabbles in urban fantasy and yet kind of approaches that…
[Dan] One of the things that Harry Potter never does is cross back over the other direction. You never see people with guns show up to take out a troll or whatever. I think that that could happen. She chose not to do it, and it worked fine, but…
[Howard] Yeah. Well, and… there’s cultural reasons, likely, why she didn’t want to write that sort of a book. Which is fine, because Larry Correia wrote that sort of a book and it’s great fun.

[Brandon] You know what? I think we do need to do another podcast on urban fantasy where we delve a little bit directly into how to write it. So I’m going to go ahead and can-of-worms this and say let’s do another podcast where we force Dan to actually tell us how to write great urban fantasy.
[Howard] Oh, great.
[Dan] Oh, come on.
[Brandon] I think we’ve done a good job of defining it and talking about some of the pitfalls. But we need more. So I’m going to go ahead and call this episode, and I’m going to make Howard do a writing prompt.

[Howard] OK. Writing prompt. Urban fantasy, and the source… or the point of origin for your crossover between the real world and the magical world is any retail space that would qualify as a big-box store. You figure out why big-box stores break the borders, but Wal-Mart, Home Depot, that’s where it’s going down.
[Dan] Nice.
[Howard] You’re out of excuses, now go write.
[Brandon] Now go write.